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Stone shape
Stone Shape is a transmutation spell that reshapes stone objects. Effect You can form an existing piece of stone into any shape that suits your purpose. For example, you can make a stone weapon, a special trapdoor, or a crude idol. Stone shape also permits you to reshape a stone door to make an exit where one didn’t exist or to seal a door shut. While it’s possible to make crude coffers, doors, and so forth with stone shape, fine detail isn't possible. There is a 30% chance that any shape including moving parts simply doesn't work. Arcane Material Component Soft clay, which must be worked into roughly the desired shape of the stone object and then touched to the stone while the verbal component is uttered. Notes Stone Shape is a fairly basic utility spell, usable by both clerics and wizards to reshape stone into a form of the caster's choice. Fine detail work isn't possible, and moving parts are tricky. Used in a dungeon by adventurers, this spell is fairly useful; back in civilization, it can be even more so. The simplest possible use of stone shape - making holes in rock - probably isn't cost-effective for use outside the dungeon. A fifth-level caster can reshape fifteen cubic feet of stone, which comes out to a cube less than two and a half feet on a side. A strong man with a pickaxe and a few ranks in Profession (Miner) can probably cut away at least that much stone in a day's work, and does so on much better wages. Repairing stone is another matter. Sealing cracks in walls and making similar improvements may prove worth it, if tearing down and replacing the original stonework is a pricey enough proposition - think castle walls and temple foundations, here. Figuring out the exact effectiveness of repairwork, in D&D mechanics terms, isn't hard - a 5' by 5' section of stone wall, one inch thick, is breached if it takes 15 hit points of damage; this means that fifteen cubic feet of stone has a total of 108 hit points. Pretty potent, given the effectiveness of cure spells. Of course, before you can start repairing stonework, you have to make it, and stone shape can be useful here as well. Laying a fifteen-cubic-foot stone block, reshaped into the form of your choice, can be an attractive and effective tool in construction projects. Lay a cubic block down, call a spellcaster over, and a few seconds later you've got a 15' tall square column one foot thick, or a 19' tall cylindrical column. Fine detail and ornamentation may not be possible, but calling in the artists after the bruteforce work is done isn't unreasonable. Even more effective, maybe, is turning the stone mass into a flat sheet, only a couple of inches thick - instant pavement, covering ninety square feet worth of ground. The resulting stonework is solid, durable, and less damaging to feet, hooves and wheelrims than cobblestones or similar methods of road construction. With only a little preplanning, slit-trench sewers can be dug before the pavement is laid down, and small holes knocked in the center of the pavement afterwards. The resulting smell may not be pleasant, but it's undoubtedly healthier than the alternative. Other construction methods - seamless pipe, walls and buttresses - are also easily imagined, and fairly straightforward to implement. As a result, cities built on a strong magical tradition and using stone shape for a lot of their construction work are going to be, arguably, much more advanced than those without. Category:Enchantment spells Category:3rd level cleric spells Category:3rd level druid spells Category:5th level sorcerer and wizard spells Category:3rd level craft domain spells Category:3rd level earth domain spells